Currently, most digital broadcasting including a ground radio wave, a satellite, and a cable provides a service based on an MPEG-2 system technique. In order to utilize the MPEG-2 system techniques to develop a service and system, a transmitting system such as an encoder or a multiplexer is basically required. However, it is difficult to realistically build an entire system in view of cost. Therefore, equipment which transmits an MPEG-2 stream which is formed in advance is utilized.
However, a broadcasting transmitting system is basically designed to continuously transmit an encoded stream from the encoder to a receiving terminal without having any interruption so that when a test stream having a limited capacity is used, the same environment as an actual broadcasting transmitting system is not provided. There may be no problems if a reproducing duration of the test stream is set to be very long or the test is performed only for the reproducing duration, but this may cause lots of inconvenience to developers.
Even though there is a related art which repeatedly transmits the test stream having a limited capacity, the related art has a problem in that discontinuous time is generated at a moment when the test stream is repeatedly transmitted so that the repeatedly reproduced stream does not look like a continuous stream but interruption is caused. Even though MPEG-2 TS solves a problem of interruption of the stream due to the repeated reproduction, when next-generation broadcasting which is being discussed uses a segment and IP instead of MPEG-2 TS, the same problem is expected. Therefore, it is required to solve the above problem.